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RVIEW
The Covenant
I
n
1588, a young English woman (seven-months pregnant) looked
out over the sea, and what she saw—the Spanish Armada, with 130
heavily armed ships planning to invade the island—so frightened
her that she went into premature labor, the midwife being fear.
Fear, in fact, was an apt metaphor for her child, Thomas Hobbes,
who became one of Europe's greatest political theorists. Living at
a time when England had been wracked by civil war and endless
religious violence, Hobbes wrote that humankind, without a strong,
all-encompassing government, existed in a state of perpetual fear—
fear of instability, fear of conquest, and, most of all, fear of death.
People lived in what he called "the war of all against all" and that
unless something radical was done, human life would be, he warned,
nothing but "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."—"Advocates
of the Method of Science," in
Socrates to Sartre: A History of
Philosophy,
Samuel Enoch Stumpf, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1982), pp. 223, 225.
What was the solution? Hobbes said that there was only one: The
people must place themselves under a single power that would reduce
all their wills to a single will and that would exercise complete authority
over them. This power, this sovereign—be it a single man or an
assembly of men—through wielding absolute hegemony over the
nation, would end the terrible conditions that made their lives so
fearful and unstable. In other words, in exchange for all their rights,
the people got peace and security instead. This transfer of power,
from the people to the sovereign, is what Hobbes called the covenant.
The covenant idea, however, did not originate with Thomas Hobbes.
On the contrary. Thousands of years earlier, God made a covenant
with Israel, a covenant whose roots, in fact, went back even farther in
time. Unlike Hobbes's covenant, which was initiated and promulgated
by the people, this covenant was initiated and promulgated by the true
Sovereign, the Creator of heaven and earth. Also, though Hobbes's
covenant was motivated solely by fear, God's covenant is motivated
by love, His love for the fallen race, a love that led Him to the Cross.
Because of the Cross, we love the Sovereign back, and just as in
the Hobbesian covenant, where the subjects had to surrender to the
sovereign, we surrender, too—our sinful ways, our fears, our twisted
notions of right and wrong. We do this not to gain something in return
but because we have already been given the best the Sovereign can
give—Jesus Christ and the redemption found only in Him.
This quarter we look closely at what God's covenant is, what it
offers, even what it demands. Though drawn from many sources, the
lessons rely heavily on work of the late Dr. Gerhard Hasel, whose
insights into the Word (where the covenant promises are revealed) will
give encouragement, hope, and understanding in order that we can
learn something which, perhaps, Thomas Hobbes never did: "There is
no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear" (1 John 4:18).
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